by Lee Child
The Fourth Man
by Lee Child
Contents
The Fourth Man
About the Author
Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a writer of outstanding body of crime fiction, the International Thriller Writers’ ThrillerMaster, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.
I was walking south, with the traffic, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, on the right-hand sidewalk, on the block before the Empire State, when a complete stranger put her hand on my arm and said, ‘I know who you are.’
I was pretty sure she didn’t. I was pretty sure if I asked, she would say I was a guy about to luck into an unrepeatable financial opportunity. Or meet a tall dark stranger. Or some such advantageous thing. But only if I gave her twenty bucks first. Maybe fifty. That part would be somehow crucial. She was a fine-boned individual, with blonde hair and blue eyes, maybe forty, a little worn down and hard around the edges, wearing a black business suit, gone a little shiny from cleaning, and too warm for the weather. She was carrying a black leather pocketbook, slung over her shoulder. It was bulging with items, some of them heavy.
I said, ‘So who am I?’
‘You’re Jack Reacher,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘No middle name. Thirteen years in the military police.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Have you ever been to Australia?’
‘That’s a question, not an answer.’
‘Have you?’
She had been raised in Chicago, I thought, judging by her vowel sounds.
I asked her, ‘Where did you go to college?’
‘Yale,’ she said. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Remember your sophomore year?’
‘I guess.’
‘That was about the last time I went to Australia.’
‘You were still in the army then.’
‘I stopped off on my way back from Korea.’
‘Why?’
‘Vacation,’ I said. ‘It was summertime there, and winter everyplace else.’
‘Not everyplace,’ she said. ‘It’s a hemisphere thing.’
‘A woman was involved. I met her in Bali.’
‘Any problems with your visit?’
‘Who are you?’ I asked her again.
She unslung her bag. Heavy items clicked and shifted. She put her hand inside. Pedestrians flowed around us. Three NYPD cops watched from across the light. She came out with an ID wallet. A gold shield. She was FBI. A special agent. Her name was Cynthia Mitchell.
She said, ‘Would you come downtown and answer a couple of questions?’
‘Why?’
‘International cooperation,’ she said. ‘And it might be in your interest.’
‘How?’
‘Australian law enforcement found a list. There were four people on it, including you. The other three are dead.’
Special Agent Cynthia Mitchell made four cell phone calls from the sidewalk, and as she finished up the last of them a plain black sedan stopped at the kerb next to us. It had steel wheels with hubcaps, and two needle antennas on the roof. Inside it smelled of automotive cleaning products. Mitchell scooted in behind the driver. I sat next to her, behind the empty front passenger seat. The driver was a solid guy in a suit. He took off without a word, heading south with the traffic, towards the blank government buildings way downtown. Mitchell didn’t talk. Instead she worked her phone with her thumbs, doing texts and e-mails.
Twenty minutes later we parked underground and rode upstairs in a slow elevator that smelled of rubber. The guy in the suit peeled off in a different direction, and Mitchell led me onward to a double- wide office furnished as a conference room. It had a long table and leather chairs with slender chrome legs. In one of the chairs was a guy in a blue suit. He was about Mitchell’s own age, maybe forty, with unruly fair hair above an open-air tan, and wide shoulders, and battered hands. Worn down in a different way than Mitchell. Maybe a ballplayer once. Now a federal agent. Which he turned out to be, but not ours.
Mitchell said, ‘This is Pete Peterson from the Australian consulate. He’s their senior counterterrorism guy. His home office found the list. He’s the one with the questions. All we’re doing is helping out.’
Peterson said, ‘We asked all our friends to run some photographs through their facial recognition software and their local databases. Your picture matched both your old army photo, and the photo on your new passport. You haven’t changed much. Our friends in the FBI were good enough to pass on your name. We tried to contact you, but we got nowhere.’
I said, ‘When was this?’
‘A year ago.’
‘I was a hard man to find, a year ago.’
‘Evidently.’
‘The list came with photographs?’
Peterson shook his head.
‘Not with,’ he said. ‘The photographs were the list. That’s all there was. Four photographs in an envelope. Nothing else.’
‘Where?’
‘We got a tip about an address in Sydney. No one was home, but we got a houseful of evidence. It was part of a sophisticated gang operation. Maybe organized crime, maybe terrorism. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Everything in the house was inventoried and studied. The envelope with the photographs seemed to mean nothing. Just four random guys. Definitely no one thought of them as a list of anything. They were filed away.’
‘A year ago?’
‘Three years ago. They seemed to mean nothing, so we didn’t put them on the wires. Not back then.’
‘What changed a year ago?’
‘A year ago we found out we were already a year late. The situation had started to change two years ago. One day we took a routine look at the tracks and traces, and we saw we had gotten three separate pings, from homicide detectives in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They were running database searches of their own. Three out of our four photographs had been murdered over the previous twelve months. At which point we mentally turned the envelope into a list of targets. We put all four faces on the global wires. We thought we could get background from the three dead guys, and then maybe use it to save the fourth guy.’
‘It worked,’ I said. ‘Here I am.’
‘We didn’t get much background. We’re hoping you can tell us something.’
‘About what?’
‘Why you’re on the list.’
‘I have no idea. I never went to Australia with three other guys. And when I was there I’m pretty sure I didn’t offend anyone. Not that bad, anyway.’
Peterson ducked away and came back with a briefcase. He laid it on the table. He opened it up. He lifted out a thin khaki file.
‘Not the originals,’ he said. ‘Very high quality reproductions.’
In the file were ten sheets of glossy paper. Photographs of the photographs, plus their envelope, in each case front and back. The Australian lab had done an outstanding job. The images were grainless and highly detailed. Every fleck and fibre was visible. It was immediately obvious the original photographs were not really photographs at all. They were Xerox copies of photographs. Pretty good, but a little dull and sooty. Mine was an army photograph. Some new ID requirement, maybe five years before the end. The good old days.
The other three faces I had never seen before.
But their pictures resembled mine, in terms of their rigid postures, and their impatient glares. All some kind of official ID.
I asked, ‘Who were they?’
Peterson said, ‘Two Brits and an American. All retired military.’
‘What kind?’
‘Cooperation only goes so far. We got pretty bland answers. Supply units, mostly.’
‘What did they say about me?’
‘Traffic duty, mostly.’
‘Not my fault,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’m just the messenger.’
I said, ‘Why were they in Australia?’
‘The Brits were visiting family,’ Peterson said. ‘Lots of Brits have family in Australia. The American was there on business.’
All four faces had a deep dimple in the paper, high on the forehead. From the metal butterfly clasp on the envelope. Which was made of stiff brown paper, unmarked on either side, except for a rime of perished glue under the flap.
I asked, ‘How often did the Brits go visit their families?’
‘Every couple of years,’ Peterson said. ‘Flights are cheap now. It’s a great vacation.’
‘Had the American been there before?’
‘Many times,’ Peterson said. ‘He was a mining executive. He was in and out like a fiddler’s elbow.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘OK what?’
‘Who had been living at the address in Sydney?’
‘We couldn’t tell. They were highly disciplined. It was pretty much a sterile environment. Food and clothing were generic Australian.’
‘They were from the former Yugoslavia,’ I said.
Peterson asked me to come see him first thing the next morning, at his place. The Australian consulate, on 42nd Street, across from Grand Central. I said I would, if I hadn’t already left town by then. He thought I was kidding about that. He smiled. I didn’t. I left the FBI building and stopped in at the third copy shop I saw, which had computers to rent in ten-minute blocks, and no other customers, which meant the guy behind the counter would have time to answer technical questions, which I was sure I would have.
First I got a visa for Australia. On line, virtually automatic, virtually instantaneous. My name, my passport number, my ATM card. A healthy fee. Click to accept. Then I bought an airplane ticket on the next flight out. JFK to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Sydney. Then I paid for my computer time and caught a cab to the airport. First thing the next morning I was a long way from Grand Central Terminal.
I slept most of the way across the Pacific, in a hard upright seat. I was comfortable. Sleeping sitting up was a skill a person learned in the army, and I had never lost it. Arrival in Sydney was undramatic. Immigration was routine. I had no luggage, but even so I lingered in the baggage hall. My sense of day and time was scrambled. I felt I needed to be on the ball. I figured the clock was already ticking. I figured alerts were already going out, in all kinds of different directions.
Five minutes later I stepped out to the arrivals hall. I stopped under a sign about ground transportation. Trains and buses and taxis. This way and that way. I followed the arrow for the taxi line. I walked neither fast nor slow. I saw a guy in a suit watching me. Behind me, on my left. Trying hard, but completely obvious. A common problem, all over the world. Clearly no different in Australia. The kind of guy capable of the feats and achievements necessary to get promoted to an undercover role is not the kind of guy who looks natural, standing around doing nothing in a suit. Too much energy, and discipline, and purpose. Even standing still.
He was one of three things. Maybe just a routine post-Customs snoop, in this case interested in a passenger off a transcontinental flight, who carried no luggage at all. No suitcase on wheels, no backpack, no shoulder bag, no nothing. Not normal.
Or maybe he was one of Pete Peterson’s boys. Whatever day and time it was in Sydney, it was way after yesterday’s first thing next morning in New York. Maybe Peterson had asked around. Maybe he had checked his computers on a hunch. Or maybe there was an established protocol. Maybe all new visa applicants came across his desk. He had plenty of time to organize a reception committee. I was in the air a very long time.
The third possibility was he was a bad guy.
I walked on. I found the end of the taxi line. There were twenty people ahead of me. I leaned the base of my spine on the barrier rail, and arched my back, as if easing a pain, and twisted left, where I saw the head of the line, and the exit lanes beyond it, and then I twisted right, where I saw the guy in the suit still watching me.
And this time also talking on a cell phone.
I waited. We all shuffled up, one carful at a time. I watched the traffic behind me. Maybe the guy in the suit was calling up a chase car. To follow my taxi, when my turn came. I looked for vehicles idling at the kerb, loitering, going nowhere, just waiting. There were dozens of them. It was the arrivals lane at an airport.
My turn came. I slid in the back of a cab and asked for the opera house. I watched out the back window for the first mile. Dozens of cars were following us. Same speed, same relative position, never changing. A river of traffic. The main route between the airport and downtown. To be expected. Nothing to be learned. I faced front again. It was late morning, according to the sun. A beautiful day. Which beautiful day, I still wasn’t sure.
We got near the harbour. The opera house was built on a promontory. It was world famous and iconic and beautiful and one of the planet’s great attractions. But because of its position out over the water it needed a purposeful there-and-back detour. It needed a specific intention. You didn’t just pass it by, accidentally. Which is why I chose it. It would act as a filter. I would see which of the cars behind us really meant business.
The answer was only one. I got out of the cab and a car slowed to a stop twenty yards away. It was a large shapeless sedan painted brown. Made by the Australian version of General Motors. In it was a lone guy, wearing sunglasses and a black leather jacket. I turned to go and he shut the motor down and got out and left the car right where it was, parked not very straight in a no-parking zone. Which didn’t help me decide who he was. A Customs agent might park like that. Or any of Pete Peterson’s boys. Because they all had immunity. But equally a bad guy might park like that. Because he didn’t care. Because he had bigger things on his mind.
I walked on, towards the swooping structure. I didn’t look back. But I listened back. I heard the guy in the shades. I heard his footsteps. I picked them out. I detoured towards the water. Away from the crowds. The footsteps followed. About ten yards back. Ahead of me I saw a corner, and a barrier, and a gate, big enough for a truck. A scenery dock, maybe. The unseen guts of the building. Not famous or iconic or beautiful.
I ducked under the barrier and walked on. Then I stopped and looked out over the water. The footsteps got closer. When they were three steps away I turned around. The guy in the shades was thirty-something, medium height, dark-haired, and he needed a shave. He was muscled up to the point of looking stocky. His leather jacket was tight across his shoulders. It looked like motorcycle equipment.
I said, ‘Show me ID.’
Instead he showed me a knife.
Which answered my question about who he was. Not a Customs agent. Not one of Pete Peterson’s boys. The knife was a military-issue combat weapon. But not U.S. Not NATO. Maybe Czech. Or Yugoslavian.
I said, ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Funny man,’ he said.
‘You need to talk to your boss about tactics. This is really stupid. I’ve been in the country less than twenty minutes. You might as well draw a picture.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’re the last. We won’t be using this method again.’
‘Did you do the first three?’
‘You wearing a wire?’
‘Just curious.’
‘You think this is a TV show? You think I should tell you everything, and then somehow you’ll knock the knife out of my hand, and we’ll struggle, and you’ll take me pris
oner?’
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Pretty much.’
‘The others thought so too. They were all hard men. Just like you. Didn’t help them. Won’t help you.’
‘They weren’t expecting you. I was. I led you right here. We’re in a loading bay. There’s no one around.’
‘I have a knife.’
‘And I have a rule. Pull a knife on me, I break your arm. It’s a childhood thing. Kind of stayed with me. Actually I have another rule first. I forgot to mention. Something my mother always made me say. I have to give you the chance to walk away. In this case you could carry a message for me. To your boss. No dishonour in that.’
‘What’s the message?’
‘Tell him they both cried like babies.’
The guy came straight at me, with the blade out in front. I don’t like knives. Never have. Never will. But over the years I have learned how to deal with them. Which is sometimes to ignore them. To delete them from the scene. Not a knife coming at you, but a fist. You want to get hit by a fist? Of course you don’t, so you stay calm, and you twist away, a routine evasive real-world manoeuvre, a move you have made a million times before, so you dodge the knife easily, without either thinking about it or getting all worked up about it.
And then you stay with the fistfight illusion by continuing to ignore the knife entirely, and by using your falling-away momentum to whip a hooking right into the guy’s face.
At which point he gave up the knife involuntarily. First his sunglasses exploded, and his heels came up in the air like he had run into a clothes line, and the knife clattered to the concrete, and he went down flat on his back, with a sound that was mostly a dusty thump, flesh and bone, but also a wet crack, behind his head, which didn’t bode well. He lay still. He kept on breathing. His eyes stayed open. But he wasn’t seeing anything. He wasn’t reacting to anything. Even when I broke his arm.
He had nothing in his pockets except a car key marked Holden, which was presumably the brown sedan, and a cell phone, which had a log showing incoming and outgoing calls between six different people. Clearly the guy liked to chat.